Towards Automated Seizure Detection With Wearable EEG – Grand Challenge

Abstract

The diagnosis of epilepsy can be confirmed in-hospital via video-electroencephalography (vEEG). Currently, long-term monitoring is limited to self-reporting seizure occurrences by the patients. In recent years, the development of wearable sensors has allowed monitoring patients outside of specialized environments. The application of wearable EEG devices for monitoring epileptic patients in ambulatory environments is still dampened by the low performance achieved by automated seizure detection frameworks. In this work, we present the results of a seizure detection grand challenge, organized as an attempt to stimulate the development of automated methodologies for detection of seizures on wearable EEG. The main drawbacks for developing wearable EEG seizure detection algorithms is the lack of data needed for training such frameworks. In this challenge, we provided participants with a large dataset of 42 patients with focal epilepsy, containing continuous recordings of behind-the-ear (bte) EEG. We challenged participants to develop a robust seizure classifier based on wearable EEG. Additionally, we proposed a subtask in order to motivate data-centric approaches to improve the training and performance of seizure detection models. An additional dataset, containing recordings with a bte-EEG wearable device, was employed to evaluate the work submitted by participants. In this paper, we present the five best scoring methodologies. The best performing approach was a feature-based decision tree ensemble algorithm with data augmentation via Fourier Transform surrogates. The organization of this challenge is of high importance for improving automated EEG analysis for epilepsy diagnosis, working towards implementing these technologies in clinical practice.